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Environment

The PanSIG conference has had an Environmental officer since 2014, and we have been working to improve the environmental performance of the conference.

This includes local sourcing of sustainable products, reducing waste, and increasing recycling. Since some environmental impact is inevitable, especially from transport, we have also been arranging carbon offsets to compensate for our carbon footprint.

Carbon Offsets

At the 2015 Kobe conference, we collected 38,500 yen from attendees, which we contributed to a solar power generation project in Hyogo Prefecture.

At the 2017 Akita conference, we collected 70,000 yen from attendees, which we contributed to a forest project in Yokote city.

For the 2018 Tokyo conference, due to closer tracking of transportation-related emissions, we were able to get a more accurate, though higher, footprint estimate. This improved system will be used for future PanSIG calculations.

The following are estimates of the emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent for recent conferences.

CO2 Emmissions for PanSIG

Year Venue

People

CO2 (tonnes)

Offset %

2014 Miyazaki

250

47

N/A1

2015 Kobe

300

32

12%

2016 Okinawa

400

195

23%

2017 Akita

340

49

12%

2018 Tokyo

465

122.9

6%

[1] PanSIG began donating to environmental projects from 2015.

Five things you can do

Think about the four R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refuse

Bring your own water bottle, coffee mug, reusable chopsticks

Consider eating a vegetarian meal

Bring a notebook and pen

Bring your own toothbrush

Environmental initiatives for PanSIG2018

Incentivizing use of travel mugs;

Plenary gifting of travel mugs;

Reduced number of trash receptacles and notifying people to be mindful of the amount of trash they produce;

Forgoing conference bags;

Allowing participants to opt out of paper handbooks (in favor of a digital one);

Site editors

PanSIG is an annual conference sponsored and organized by many of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT). The first PanSIG conference was held in 2002.